The infamous Auschwitz
main train ramp, the PLACE of separation of
life and death. Photo courtesy Yad-vashem

THE RAMP AND THE PEOPLE ON BOTH SIDES,
ALL ACTORS IN VERY SYMBOL OF HOW LIFE CAN BECAME GROTESQUE.

The trains of the Holocaust

A
Standard convoy of the German S-Bahn, was ensemble of 50 railcars (box cars) and a steam engine
locomotive (Latin, loco: from a place + motivus:
causing motion). The steam locomotive (for freight and transport
operations, with a tractive effort of 5-10,000 tons) could pull more rails
cars and the trains could be
longer, but for war reasons, they kept this number to about 50-55 units. The
rail transportation offered some advantages to the Germans: mass transports, energy
efficient, reliability, maximum utilization of space, flexibility, low cost,
availability, easy access from the point of embarkation to the point of
destination and safety. Some time, the train can have 2 steam-locomotives
or, by 1944 and 1945 even an diesel-powered locomotive and in some places
electric locomotives.

50
people in a boxcar X 50 boxcars + 2,500 people in each convoy. This was the minimum standard load
written in the SS manuals. But normally the trains were loaded to 150 to 200%
capacity. To
supply all the logistics of the German Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union, the
army needed some 100 to 110 daily
standard trains, running from Germany to the east. some of the trains
coming back from the front were carrying destroyed equipment that needed
major repairs, wounded soldiers, looted staff and Jewish civilians.

To supply the Auschwitz-Birkenau
Complex (4 major camps) and the other myriad and network of concentration camps in Eastern Europe,
the SS needed only 1.5% of all daily German
war logistics. 1.5% it's not much of all, thinking on the big picture and on
the final achievement.

All the "thinking" was doctored in Berlin.
The operation was also a cleaver deceiving one, because the Jews, was made
to believe that the transport was for relocation purposes and sometimes in
better conditions than the previous ones.

The SS worked in conjunction and conspiracy with local loyal police, local
German military
garrisons, civilian state-run institutions as the rails system and special military police forces.
Under orders from the SS (SchutzStaffel: protective echelon) these forces
were rounding up the Jew
populations everywhere in Eastern Europe: Russia, Rumania, Hungary, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, the Baltic States, on one side and occupied Western Europe:
France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, etc. on the other side, with the advantage of the fairly developed railway system in Europe.
All the the operation of shipping Jews, was surprisingly smooth. The
Wehrmacht (German Armed and Defense Forces, 1935-1945) cooperated in
rounding the Jews, and executions on the eastern Front and Poland, but was
not declared a criminal organization as the SS was.

This
logistic that may seem "colossal" from outside and history
perspective, directed from Berlin and
muscled by SS & Collaborators, over a period of 36 month, was working
perfectly. In conclusion, all the transport operation was very simple, basic,
low cost and efficient. The average shipping time from embarkation to
destination, engine/locomotive change, mechanic crews changes, fuel and
transport documents, was 3-4,5 days.

When in Wannasse Conference, in January of 1942, under Hitler's verbal
direct order to Goering, who then commended the task to Heydrich, the
mission was to organize and to look for consent inside the "establishment"
to "emigrate" and to "evacuate" by force of all
the Jews under the temporary domain of the Nazi Germany in Europe (at that
time, about 11.000.000 people). You
can tabulate that they needed only 1.600 trains (a round figure of the
actual number of chartered train convoys). 1.600 convoys that should
feed, in a continuous and orderly way, the complex network the concentration
camps, where the Germans have just invented a new efficient, quick, silent
and economic method of mass slaughter: the gas chambers.
(December of 1941 in Auschwitz***) ( see the movie "Conspiracy" made by HBO)

Of the 6 million Jews that have been exterminated during the Second World
War (WWII): the first 2 millions were murdered immediately by the
second-rank military and political police,
mobile death squadrons of the Eisentzgruppen *. The actions
were mainly were mass executions
conducted in the newly-conquered Russian territories. The Germans were
assisted by the local polices and paramilitary groups. The tally slaughter
was from hundreds to tenths of thousand of Jewish civilians, in only day on
continuing shutting. Other thousands died of hunger, illnesses, extreme
conditions in the forced-slave work camps, drowned and even
poisoned with motor escape gases of the specially-built military trucks.
until 1941, the Germans attempted,
performed and improved all the
well-known methods in the humanity history.

In the light of the time remembered in the written memory, they were
the most cruel conqueror people of the history, only seconded by the Mongols
under Gingis-Khan, the inventors of civil terror and extreme brutality.

Some hundred of thousand
were just ensemble and made to march on foot to the concentration
camps in Rumania, Poland and Bucovina. More than 40% of them died of
extenuation and exposure, during the forced marches. The "lucky one" on the
next type of accommodation and evacuation, some 3.5-4 millions Jews in
total, were rail transported to camps in Poland.

In the German official conversations about the Jewish matters, the one code word employed was
"evacuation". One time, during a phone conversation in late 1942,
Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary and leader of the Nazi Party,
admonished Himmler in very strong terms, who was informing him that 50,000 Jews
were already exterminated in a concentration camp in Poland:
"They were not exterminated, only evacuated, evacuated, evacuated!!! ",
Bormann screamed and closed the phone.

From
Libya to Scandinavia, from Ireland to Russia, for the Germans, the task of
finding the Jews, to concentrate them and to "move" them in
trains was unaccountably easy. It was super easy in the Balkans, Central
Europe, Russia and in South-East of the Continent where they have a total
control. They benefited of the
benevolent cooperation of the French authorities and collaborators and their
developed rails system for ferrying some 76,000+ people to the final
destination: gas chambers and concentration camps in central Europe.

But
the Germans deals with Mussolini were difficult and slow in this
matter. He (Mussolini) refused giving in his Italian-Jews to the Germans
meat-grinding machine. Only after his death in 1943 (killed by Italian
Marxist/Communist partisans), the Germans could muster some 7,500+ Italian
Jews and ship them to concentration camps.

The SS
collided with the total negative attitude of the Nordic and Scandinavian
countries in collaborating with the evacuations plans. This was the reason
that most of the concentration fields were mounted and installed in Poland,
whose civil population was openly manifesting a deep anti-Semitic attitude
during the WWII and simple logistic and geography.

In total, over 1,600 trains that were
organized and logged. They transported their humble human load to the
concentration camps all over Europe and the consequent death of 2,5-3,5000,000 Jews.
I will repeat myself: this
alone represented only (and maybe less than) 1.5% of the total daily logistics of
German Wehrmacht war machine; this is an almost insignificant percentage and minimum warlike
effort.

Between 1941 and 1944 (until December of 1944, the official date
of closing organized-death-operations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Complex), the
transport / arrival timetable was of 1.5 trains
per day: this was the Germans Office or Reich
Security's basic logistic need for this "project".

This simple calculation and the organized logistics of the German Rail Road
System and logistics won, at the end of the day, the practices side of the
problem: 50
boxcars X 50 prisoners X 1.5 trains/day X 1,066 days = 4,000,000 of "evacuated"
(read: killed).

The accommodations were
simply
none: there were standard 10 meters long (30-31 foot-long)
cattle**** cars. an average, uneventful shipment can last from hours to
3-5 days. All the time
they were kept inside, with no water, food, basic sanitation or
ventilation. Accounts were made that the floor was littered with lime stone,
which burned the prisoners' feet. (Above: women prisoners inside a
train. Photo courtesy of Yad-Vashem)

The trains of the Holocaust were as well an economical and
financial operation. This shipping & logistics operation was not for free.

On September 9, 1941, the parliament of
"independent" Slovakia - a Nazi puppet state - ratified the Jewish Codex, a
series of laws and regulations that stripped Slovakia's 80,000 Jews of their
civil rights and all means of economic survival and in effect placed them
beyond the bounds of law and society. The fascist Slovak leadership was so
impatient to be rid of the Jews that it paid the Nazis DM 500 in exchange
for each expelled Jew and a promise that the deportees would never return to
Slovakia. The decision by Slovakia to initiate and pay for the expulsion was
unprecedented among the satellite states of Nazi Germany. They paid 40
millions RM to the
SS for this operation.

In fact, the SS was paying the German
Train Authority, the Reich-BAHN, the equivalent of a Third Class train
ticket for every Jewish prisoner transported to the his final destination.
Calculate: 0.5 pfennig X
8,000,000 prisoners X 600 Km (pro media of voyage length) and you get about
240 millions Riechmarks. The Jewish prisoners were paying as well for this
"transportation", full one-way ticket. Children under 10-12 years of age
paid half price, one-way ticket. All this money went to the German Rails
Authority who regarded the evacuation as a simple local freight
transportation matter.

PICTURES
COURTESY YAD-VASHEM/JERUSALEM

Some prisoners have to
considerer themselves lucky if they arrived alive. On some cases not
everything was smooth: the longest rails shipment of the war, from Corfu,
took 18 days. When the train arrived in Central Poland, and the locomotive
stopped, the doors were opened and everyone was dead. On other instances,
the prisoners have to wait in cramped waiting-rooms for days at a time,
until a transport was available. Not all the railcars Were covered. some
were with open top and the whether was of no importance for shipping
operations: day, night, rain, snow, sun, or freezing conditions.

This
logistic that may seem "colossal" from history perspective, directed from
Berlin and muscled by SS & local Collaborators, over a period of 36 month,
was working perfectly. In conclusion, on the SS side, all the transport operation
logistics was very simple, basic,
low cost, efficient, safe and smooth. Only for the purpose of organizing
death and systematic genocide!!!

Hedi Enghelberg

Writer

hedi@enghelberg.com

*
Organized by Heydrich and Himmler to fallow the German regular troops in
Poland, in 1939. The Einsatz, had the mission of to look for,
round up and to concentrate to the Jews in ghettos. In the campaign of
Russia from 1941, in an agreement with the German Army, they were ordered
to follow the assault troops and carry out the phase I of the
"evacuation" of Russian Jewish. Four Einsatzgruppen ware
formed by this reason, Gruppen A, B, C, D. With this method is believed
that more than 1.5 million Jews have been murdered. Mission:"the order was that the Jews and the Soviet political commissars were
to be liquidated. Liquidated it meant killed."

** Sixty years after sending
Slovakian Jews to the death camps, the republic holds its first official
state memorial ceremonies for victims of the Holocaust.

***September 2003:
Three Israeli Air Force F-15 fighter jets thundered over the Auschwitz death
camp Thursday afternoon in a display of modern Jewish might.
As the jets zoomed by at 300 knots an
hour, formation leader Brig.-Gen. Air Eshel read out the following
statement, which was broadcast on the ground: "We pilots of the Air
Force, flying in the skies above the camp of horrors, arose from the ashes
of the millions of victims and shoulder their silent cries, salute their
courage and promise to be the shield of the Jewish people and its nation
Israel."

The Nazis built the camp in occupied Poland in 1940. More than a million
people, 90 percent of them Jewish, perished in gas chambers or died of
starvation and disease at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex before it was
liberated by advancing Soviet troops on January 27, 1945.

****
Today there are maybe a dozen of real (authenticated) WWII cattle-rail-cars
on display, in museums around the world: Washington D.C., Dallas, Chicago,
Germany, Poland, Holland, Israel. One authentic rail car, on loan from the
museum of Gdynia (Poland) will be on display Hollywood / Florida (October 2006) as part of the
display of the South Florida Holocaust Museum Documentation and Education
Center.

There is "no word about those who committed the crimes," Hans-Rüdiger Minow,
a spokesman for the Train of Commemoration, told The Jerusalem Post.
He said 200,000 train employees were involved in the deportations and
"10,000 to 20,000 were responsible for mass murders," but were never
prosecuted | JERUSALEM POST